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More reviews by Rosie Milne
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Dorian by Will Self
DORIAN bills itself as an imitation, a shameless reworking of "our" (whose?) most significant myth of shamelessness: Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray.
In Self's version, the eponymous Dorian is beautiful, but wanton, a psychopath, who manages to hang onto his looks, and his allure, despite the facts that he is HIV positive, takes drugs, drinks, smokes, and is without compunction.
The signs of disease, ageing and corruption which should appear on his body, instead appear on an installation video artwork, called Cathode Narcissus. When Cathode Narcissus is finally wiped, by Dorian, so is Dorian himself. Or is he? And was he ever a wanton psychopath? Or were all the claims of robotic debauchery just a kind of warped love letter from Henry Wotton, Dorian's one time lover, and a self-hating AIDS victim? Or what?
Self takes as his epigraph a quotation from Schopenhauer: There is an unconscious appositeness in the use of the word person to designate the human individual... for persona really means an actor's mask... no one reveals himself as he is; we all wear a mask and play a role.
This is a book in which nothing, from men to houses, to death, to the plot, is as it seems: it's a book about appearance and reality, and the chasm between the two. It's about evil, although it's scarcely a morality tale, for Dorian's too bad for that, he's beyond what morality can deal with, he's nuts almost all along, or else, he's not, but he's driven nuts at the end.
It's a book about insanity. It's about beauty and decay. It's about a culture where everything from art to history to self-consciousness to politics has seroconverted to a trashy, would-be telegenic autobiography. It's about AIDS.
Dorian is not a cosy read. It's often frightening. It's frightening about the sexiness of drugs, especially of shooting-up, and it's not exactly reassuring on sex itself, either. Dorian himself is just one of a bunch of very scary characters. On the other hand, it's often funny, with lots of good jokes and quick digressions. And it's packed with wonderful images. An old woman: her creviced cheek was so powdered that a careless air kisser might find themselves tumbling into her face. Furniture: as comfortable as a colonoscopy. Nipples: Her nipples stuck through the material like chilled glace cherries in a freezer cabinet. A fetish of time, and death: It was the jiggling man and he was still at it, rocking and hopping from side to side like an autistic imprisoned in his own head, or a disturbed bear trapped in a zoo cage.
That must be London Zoo. Even when it is set in New York, or on the French Riviera, DORIAN is a London-centric book, and one of its strengths is that it evokes place so well, but because it's so rooted in its city, readers in Asia might sometimes find it a little peculiar. Here's Self on Henry Wotton:
- In truth, Henry Wotton had always understood - at an intuitive, cellular level - that drug addiction and sexual obsession, besides being ways of making time's amorphousness measurable, were also methods of amortising the future. That for each minute or hour or day or week of abandonment purchased now, you would have to pay later. Pay with physical dissolution and mental disintegration. On this actuarial basis alone it did not surprise him in the least to wind up dead at forty.
Would that make any sense to an HIV positive orange girl or boy, or traffic girl or boy, in Thailand or Cambodia or Burma? Would it make any sense to poverty-stricken peasants in rural China, the ones who sold their blood for profit, and, alas, shared one needle around the whole village?
Self's London based AIDS victims got AIDS because they purchased abandonment. We have victims like that out here, too, but, in Asia, millions of people got AIDS because they were forced to turn themselves into commodities, often so that other people could purchase abandonment.
Self is aware of how relatively lucky, on a scale of terrible luck, his wealthy AIDS victims are, and he does have one Asian style victim, Herman, a homeless, black rent boy who infects all Dorian's cronies, gets tipped in heroin -- very Asian, that -- and then kills himself by overdosing. But still, AIDS as something almost (almost) enviable? Hmm. And incidentally: Herman was so beautifully suitable for patronising, like a buggered up personification of Third World debt. Sure, that might sound clever round a London dinner table -- but round a communal rice bowl?
On the other hand, Self has a daffy Duchess, who is a Buddhist. Is she happy? "She's fucking furious. The Buddha is the patron saint of the passive-aggressive." It's hard not to crack a smile. And it's hard not to fall for this book. I really hope DORIAN escapes Asian censors; it's well worth reading.
Rosie Milne
25/11/2002
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Rosie Milne is a writer living in Hong Kong. Her first novel How To Change Your Life was published by Pan Macmillan in May 2002.
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